The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a meter cover.
A watt-hour meter typically includes a base housing, electro-mechanical components, electronics and a faceplate capturing all of the device's pertinent information. The assembly is typically incased in what is referred to as a meter cover. The normal expected function of the cover is to protect the internal components of the meter from its service environment, while still allowing visual and communication access to the device while the meter is in service.
In a meter's typical service environment, its internal components are expected to successfully operate within a specified temperature range. Key individual contributing influences would include local ambient temperatures, the metering device's own thermal generation, and heating effects due to solar radiation. The culmination of these three influences will be referred to as the thermal budget. The responsibility of a typical meter's design is stay within its thermal budget considering these three partitioned segments. As the demands for high-powered electronics and communication devices grow in the meter's technology, the metering device's internal thermal generation also grows and, therefore, adjustments to the thermal budget partitioning are necessary. In some cases, adjusting the thermal budget partitioning is possible by mitigating the heating effects due to solar radiation and thereby allowing the metering device's portion of the budget to grow. This is typically achieved through solar radiation shielding.
Typical shielding devices in a watt-hour meter may include, for example, oversized faceplates that shield the internal components, paper-thin polycarbonate sheets that wrap around the periphery of a meter's internal components or opaque covers that include a bonded-on transparent front face. These solutions are, however, relatively costly and difficult to perform.